Thursday, May 24, 2007

Keith Olbermann Gets It Right

But, as always, the whole story won’t fit on TVPosted by olvlzl.The deal on funding the ongoing occupation of Iraq stinks, there is no avoiding that smell. It isn’t anything as natural as methane, it’s more like a chemical toilet. Entirely artificial, worse than the thing it’s designed to cover up.

The Democratic leadership is going to take the heat for it and I’m sure they know it. That’s part of being leaders. But let’s give them their due, they tried for better things and failed to resist Bush's veto power. That failure was, in part, through trying to do with internal congressional politics what in a real democracy would have been a question of legitimate politics. They should have been able to end this disaster by relying on their rank and file members to heed the express will of The People*. The temptation will be to see this as entirely their fault and to abandon them. A case might be made for them deserving a heap of blame, either through lack of courage or just insufficient skill. But dumping them won’t fix it in time. It will hand Bush complete victory.

A disaster as huge as Bush War II requires that the political system that produced it be changed to fix the disaster and to avoid it happening again. It’s the political system that requires fixing. I think the reason is pretty clear. Our system was never perfect, it always had deep flaws, no human institution works as it’s supposed to. But it used to work somewhat better when we had a free press that was required to make an effort at informing The People in objective reality. Olbermann aside, the commercial media in this country is a fully vested member of the Bush regime. FOX triggered the coup** that put him in office, effectively the entire media, including the New York Times ratified the coup so as to not break up the cotillion. The disastrous war in Iraq is the direct result of our not having a political crisis over that stolen election. There is every reason to believe that it would have been less damaging to the lives of hundreds of millions for us to have fought it out and changed our antiquated election system when it produced the abomination of Bush v. Gore. Government of The People is infinitely important. The struggle for its establishment, preservation and extension at the cost of real blood, is nothing less than the best part of our history. Without that there is no reason for the United States to exist.

The media is the real reason that the Democratic leadership can’t do the will of the people. They proved that they want to. It is the Democratic members in swing districts in the house that prevented the limits on Bush’s insanity to become law there. The reason they did that was fear from the media and the Republican lie machine. That lie machine doesn’t have to work with the majority of the voters, it just has to work in enough swing districts to immobilize the opposition to the Bush junta.

In the Senate, the rules allow Republicans to block anything the Democrats push, in that case it is the “moderate” Republicans and conservatives elected in more liberal states who know they have nothing to fear from The People who are effectively propagandized not to throw them out of office. Exposing those frauds would end their effective veto of the will of The People. The lesson in Chaffee’s loss apparently hasn’t taken there.

It is the media that are the cause of the rot in our system. Either we fix the media through breaking up the monopolies and forcing them to stop being a propaganda arm of the corporate state or forget democracy. The presence of Olbermann and a handful of others shouldn’t shield from the reality of what they are.

We’ve discussed what it will take to fix our elections and to force our representatives to do what we want. I’m sure we’ll have to get back to that again. But even that struggle will be in the face of a full media lie campaign to keep things as they are. The way they are works for them, it doesn’t for us. The Iraq disaster is the result of things as they are.

* The People, it’s time to stop hiding the real foundation of our government in lower case letters.

** In case anyone has forgotten, it was the cousin of George Bush, John Ellis, who made the crucial decision on FOX to hold up declaring Gore the winner. Ellis was in direct consultation with Jeb Bush while he was doing that.

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